Understanding Media through the American Folk Revival

Bob Dylan’s 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance is likely what comes to mind for many music fans when contemplating the influence of technology on the genre of folk music. Electric technology can obstruct an intimate and authentic live experience of music, or so the story goes. But folk music has a much more compelling and complicated relationship to media and technology, as Henry Adam Svec thoroughly traces in American Folk Music as Tactical Media (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). The book is part of a series titled “Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques,” which emphasizes the cultural impact of media technology and the materialities of communication. One might assume from the title that the book’s primary focus is on folk music but it more readily falls within the theme of this series, with its regular and consistent engagement with media theory and media uses.

Early in the book, Svec indicates that studies of the social construction of folk-ness and authenticities within folk have been both directly and indirectly informed by concepts from cultural studies and sociology, namely Raymond Williams’ “selective tradition” and, of course, Pierre Bourdieu’s “distinction” (12) (a concept readily applied when dealing with authenticity and cultural hierarchies). Although these works have been “indispensable” to the author’s own understanding of the complexities of folk, the book takes a different tact and works to establish an extensive conceptual framework informed by media theory to chart the ways that media are “inextricable components of the cultural fabric” of folk music and its related cultural communities (13). Svec’s principal entry into the folk revival’s engagement with media is rooted in an assemblage of concepts of tactical media, but more broadly, the book is guided by larger questions like: “What if we actually had something to learn from the [American folk] revival’s understandings of communication, which is not a settled phenomenon of human societies but a malleable and thoroughly political concept? What if the American folk revival had something to teach us about media, even about digital media culture?” (13). These questions rightly challenge the commonly held assumption that positions folk against the “trivial offerings of the mass-mediated cultural industries” (14). More specifically, Svec points out that folk icons like Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger idolized working folk and their music while at the same time idolizing “the various machines with and on which the proletarian toiled” (15). The American folk revival was always “plugged in.”

With Svec’s work, we learn how folk revivalists “made do” with the tools and technologies of the day, those that were ready and available. We can consider folk revival-ists as media theorists, and more specifically, as tactical media theorists. The version of media theory that weaves throughout the book, in Svec’s words, is “thoroughly post-humanist insofar as it posits the essential imbrication of human beings with and among communication technologies” (16). Folk revivalists, then, were concerned not only with what media could do for their music, sound, or style, but with the “kinds of political communities particular media assemblages might foster, and in the kinds of political structures they might resist or subvert” (16–17). The influential work of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life ([1984] 1988) is present throughout the book’s chapters and its argumentative thrust. Tactics, according to de Certeau ([1984] 1988) are temporary but effective challenges to organized systems of power, those which take advantage of opportunities (de Certeau [1984] 1988, 38). Much of the writing on tactical media has been applied to digital media and the computer age of the 1990s but Svec suggests the concept is also useful for pre-digital media. He describes a “thickening and deepening of tactical media by the American folk revival” (22). Drawing on media archaeology, the book treats its central concepts like “folk” and “tactics” as discursive constructions as opposed to stable objects. Svec names his approach “folk archaeology,” a nod to Foucault’s media archaeology and treatment...